ChicagoWiz's RPG Blog: Using my DM skills for "good"?

Please read this!

Use your D&D skills to fight real world evils.

ChicagoWiz's RPG Blog: Using my DM skills for "good"?: "This is an odd post to write because it's not as much about gaming as it is about the exercise of my skills in creating alternate realities ..."

School Bites as a Witch Girls setting

I have been a long time fan of Eerie Cuties a web comic featuring high school age vampires, witches, a succubus and other fantasy/horror creatures.  I have mentioned Eerie Cuties in the past and in particular Chole the Succubus. At the time I thought EC would make for a great alternate setting for Witch Girls Adventures.  I still think that in fact and will try to stat up a few of the characters this week.

One of the comics that is advertised on the EC page is School Bites.  I have read it a few times and enjoyed it.  Well I have been doing my research on Tarot Witch of the Black Rose and it dawned on me then that the Holly G of Tarot was the same as the Holly G of School Bites.  I suppose all the Tarot ads should have been a giveaway.  

So School Bites is about Cherri Creeper a new vampire and the vampire school she now attends. There is a lot going on in the comic that make it great material for a game.  New powers, a rival gang coven of vampires and of course plenty of teen angst issues.  It's funny, witty and certainly PG-13 with some of the drawings and innuendo. Of course that is also a great description of Witch Girls Adventures, except swap out witches for vampires.

While I did read through all the comics, there are not a lot of powers demonstrated yet.  Which is kind of the point, they have some powers they just don't know how they all work yet and don't have the rest.

But I can make some guesses.

Cherri Creeper (former name Charlotte Webb)
Body: d6
Mind: d6
Senses: d6
Will: d4
Social: d6
Magic: d6

Life Points: 12   Reflex: 9
Resist magic: 9  Zap Points: 12
Skills:  Acrobatics 1, Art 2, Basics 2, Fib 2, Hear 2, Plucky 2, Streetwise 2, Urchin 2
Cryptozoology 2, Mysticism 1

Traits: Friendly,  Urban, Vampire

18 year old Charlotte Webb was living on her own in New York attending art school.  That is till one night (Halloween to be exact) that she was attacked by vampire Dante Le Bon.  Now a new vampire and loving her unlife Cherri (as she is now known) is learning what it is to be a vampire.
She has some new good friends, a fuzzy bat, some cool new teachers and wings (that she doest quite know how to use yet).  Of course there are problems.  There is this guy she likes, but he is human, and Le Bon now knows of her and wants her back for his coven.

There are more characters including a vampire cat girl, a vampire cheerleader, a nosfeatu prince and a vegan wicca vampire.  It's like chibi-animie World of Darkness.

It's fun stuff and I am looking forward to seeing some more.  I'd like to see some of the world myths explored some more and how exactly a cat-girl vampire came to be.  

Satan's Game

Saw this online and made me laugh.

"If Dungeons and Dragons is Satan's game, then Satan is a giant nerd."

From James D. Hargrove's sig file on RPGNet.

Superhero RPGs: Welcome to the lower shelves

I started out this year on a Super Hero high.  I picked up Icons, Bash!, the new DC Adventures RPGs.  I was looking forward to the Mutants and Masterminds 3.0 and all was good.

Then today I put all my Mutants and Masterminds books on the lower shelves.  My lower shelves have these nice doors and look really sharp, but the games are there are ones I have not touched in a very long time.  Mutants and Masterminds 2.0, Hero High, Freedom City Source book and the Book of Magic all went down below today.  They were replaced with the Mentzer BECMI books I got at the auction recently that had just been sitting on my game table (much to chagrin of my wife).

The hierarchy of my games are the Upper Shelves, these are the games I play all the time.   The ones at the level the kids can reach are usually D&D related.  Out of their reach are my horror games and Unisystem games.  The Lower Shelves are closed off, so out of site, out of mind.  These games can sit there for months or years before I even recall I have them.  Then there is the selling shelf.  It is the same level as the Unisystem stuff, just a different part.  I am planning to sell these soon either at the game auction or Half-Priced books.

I am not sure when I going to play a supers game again.  I know I will, but I just have no ideas at the moment for one nor do I think my various groups will want to do one any time soon.  M&M joins some high quality games in the dark of my lower shelves.  The "new" World of Darkness books (Vampire the Masquerade remains on the higher shelf), True 20 (really wanted to love that game) and all my Anime games.  Dresden Files and Little Fears are there too, but I expect I'll be be pulling them back after a bit.

There are still some things I want to try though.
I have a character that is the daughter of Superman and Wonder Woman for this Next Generation supers game we started.  I am basing it on the events of Kingdom Come and Batman Beyond.  I wanted to try her out in a bunch of systems (M&M2, DCA, Bash, Icons) to get a good idea how the games stat up against each other. Plus I liked the character.  She was raised on Paradise Island, trained by Bruce Wayne and my main influence for her was...Ally McBeal.  Sorry. I just thought it would be neat if she had decided to be a lawyer.

Ok so you know how much I love Willow & Tara?  Well my oldest is the same way.  His obsession though is Fire and Ice. He has Fire and Ice figures and even Hero Clix that we use in his Dragonslayers game (in this game they are elemental wizards).  I feel like I owe it to him to stat them up at least once in some system.

Maybe I'll still get them up sometime.
I can go with their Pre-Crisis incarnations what are more magic based.

Is 2nd Ed the next wave of OSR?

I posted a couple days back on the growing 2nd Ed AD&D love I have been seeing on the net and in the blogs. Not a lot of it mind you, more like a few vocal people in a crowd still going on about how the LBBs are the "best thang evar!"  (Ok for the record NO one has ever actually said that, that way.)

But the OSR movement has slowed down to stead pace now and we are not getting Yet Another OD&D Clone this month and I think people are giving 2nd Ed another look.

I have mentioned in that past that 2nd Ed is the game I ran the most but hardly ever played.  I was very much a DM only with that game.  In fact I was one of the early adopters of the game, buying it on the day it came out and not even taking any of my 1st Ed books with me back to college.  But sometime in the late 90's that (and I) changed.  When 2nd Ed came out I was a single college kid, living in the dorms and surviving on the the money I made tutoring others in math and physics. When 3rd Ed came out I was married, living in a house with a brand new baby and just laid off my teaching job because the grant funding at the university dried up.   I was two completely different people.    In the middle I nearly gave up on D&D all together and even sold off 80% of my collection in favor of games like "WitchCraft RPG" and "Vampire" and other horror games.  All that I have left now for 2nd ed is the three cores, the Celts guide and some Ravenloft stuff.  Though the PHB and DMG are my originals and I got them the day they were rel

Why is any of that important?  It's important because it has permanently colored how I view AD&D 2nd Ed. for years.  I did remember the joy of the getting the latest Monstrous Compendium supplement, I only recalled the dreck of the Skills and Powers books.

But as time goes on and I wax on about earlier systems it is only natural that eventually my rose colored glasses gaze on 2nd Ed. Others seem to be doing the same.

2nd Ed as a retro-clone though has some issues it must deal with first.
- First, 2nd Ed is mechanically not all that different from 1st Ed.  One could in theory play a "2nd Ed Game" with nothing more than OSRIC.  One of the big selling points behind 2nd Ed was it re-organized the material from earlier editions.  It is in a sense the first Retro-clone.
- What made 2nd Ed special to many were the campaign worlds, and those don't fall under the OGL at all.  Plus most of the OSR folks seem to prefer sandbox worlds so anything created by them would naturally fit into any other world.
- The Proficiency system of 2nd Ed is needlessly complicated.  Note I am not saying it is complicated itself, it's not, but it is more complicated than it needs to be for a game.  3rd Ed's Skill system is superior in nearly every respect, and 4th Ed's is better still.  Reverse engineering it would not be difficult (premise, not every skill is worth the same amount) but I'd have to ask why?

The monster's in 2nd Ed were a nice improvement over 1st ed. I like the one monster per page format, something that 3rd ed dropped but 4th ed picked back up.

Personally I think it is only a matter of time before someone does a full on 2nd Ed clone.  I know there are some in development now.   I know of and have looked at the beta of Adventures Dark and Deep, a sort of "what-if game", as in what if Gygax had developed AD&D 2nd ED the way he had planned.

Blog pimpin'

So I have been adding blogs in my blog list to various social book marking sites like Digg and Delicious.

I don't know if it will help drive hits to these sites, but it can't hurt right?
Here are my bookmarks.  Still adding to it.
http://www.delicious.com/timsbrannan/?page=1

To follow up

On yesterday's post about Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose.  I have seen some issues now and I see that both sides have some valid points.

But I am afraid of becoming this guy...
http://ourvaluedcustomers.blogspot.com/2010/10/as-he-was-paying-for-2-newest-issues-of.html

More later.